For many of his supporters, an election loss for Donald Trump is an epistemological impossibility. For them, Trump has always already won.
He won, they say, in 2016, and not just the Electoral College vote but the popular vote as well — if you subtract the 3 million fraudulent votes cast by illegals bused across the southern border to cast ballots for Hillary Clinton. He won the 2020 election — if you acknowledge that millions more illegals crossed the border to vote again, that Sharpie pens were intentionally given to Republican voters so that the ink would bleed through and discredit their ballots, that Dominion voting machines had a China-made chip in them that automatically changed Trump votes to Biden votes, and that in Georgia those videos actually showed suitcases full of illicit ballots being taken out and counted in the middle of the night. And he will win again this time, even if Democrats manage to somehow cover up their shenanigans once again.
One likely scenario we are facing is that, if Trump is leading in the decisive battleground states on election night, he will declare victory and his campaign officials and legal team will flood major media outlets to amplify that emphatic message. The likely delay in final vote counts in the days that follow will be depicted as election malfeasance, and there will be staged events in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and elsewhere. These won’t be like Rudy Giuliani’s poorly organized Four Seasons stunt in 2020. It is probably safe to assume that they will have been organized well in advance by a team of competent professionals — a sort of Project Election 2025.
Sowing distrust right away opens the door to large angry rallies at election boards in decisive counties by tens of thousands of Trump supporters. Imagine a much larger but decentralized Jan. 6, 2021, made up of militia members, enraged voters and individual saboteurs.
Given that Trump already tried — and failed — to challenge the election results four years ago; given that this attempt was resisted by his own attorney general, GOP leaders in state legislatures and finally his own vice president, Mike Pence; given that it prompted a violent melee by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, resulting in over a thousand convictions; and finally given that a growing number of the most prominent officials of his administration have publicly accused him of being a literal fascist interested in nothing but power — given all of this, we have to ask: How is it possible that we find ourselves here again?
Part of this has to do with the presidency itself. The objective power and subjective meanings of this institution have changed dramatically over time, as have the media through which images of presidents and presidential candidates are projected and contested. In his book “The Politics Presidents Make,” political scientist Stephen Skoworonek has shown how the presidency has developed over time, first from a patrician era when leadership was based on reputation among a small group of national elites to a partisan era characterized by patronage of party factions and local machines. Then came a pluralist period, distinguished by the rise of bureaucracy and bargaining between competing interests, followed finally by a plebiscitary era, characterized by a greater emphasis on direct political relationships with the public.
Yet for all the ways that presidential power has expanded and changed in terms of its relation to other institutions, it has been linked since the country’s founding to the president’s role as a signifier for a specific vision of national identity. As the political theorist Anne Norton has argued, “The President represents, in an instance of official multivocality, the nation, the government, the executive branch, and (as Tocqueville observes) the triumphant party.”
We are now in a moment where one party sees its leader as the embodiment of the nation itself, as a redeemer and, as Trump puts it, the people’s “retribution.” For Trump supporters, their candidate has always been abused and scorned (just as they imagine themselves to be) and he has always triumphed. He has been impeached, indicted, silenced, convicted, sued and fined, yet he comes back to win again. And since the assassination attempt in July, he has experienced a kind of apotheosis. The image of Trump rising from the floor of the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania — blood-spattered and with a clenched fist, urging his people on into battle — is burned into the collective psyche of his followers. He is not Lincoln, not JFK; he is mightier than both of them and now clearly an instrument of God’s will.
This particular kind of presidential fantasy goes back to birtherism, the belief that originated with the Tea Party movement during Barack Obama’s presidency (and was then propagated by both Trump and, lest we forget, Liz Cheney) that the 44th president was not born on U.S. soil and was thus not actually the 44th president. This delusory thinking provided many white Americans with shelter from truths that were too difficult to bear. It simply couldn’t be that America had a Black president, so a conspiratorial explanation seemingly grounded in official proof (or lack thereof) had to be brought in to explain it. That kind of delusion gained support among a large segment of the white public, as more and more of the political elite in the Republican Party became willing to hedge on the question. People were enticed by the comfort it afforded to simply decide to inhabit an alternate reality. The fantasy that Obama wasn’t really the president then is of a piece with the fantasy that Trump really is the president now.
It would be wrong to lay this all at the feet of Trump’s voters. Deluded belief in voter fraud is only possible because it is pushed by top officials in the campaign, within the broader right-wing media ecosystem and by legions of far-right posters on social media. And we should remember that Republican Party leaders and campaign strategists have been crying “vote fraud” since the contested 2000 election. On the night of Nov. 7, 2000, as the election results were coming in, the race was initially too close to call. The state of Florida was pivotal, and its electoral votes would determine who became president. Due to the closeness of the election, an automatic recount was triggered. The Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount of undervotes, focusing on counties with high numbers of irregularities. During this recount, there were legal battles over disputed ballots and recounts, particularly in Miami-Dade County. On Nov. 22, 2000, an organized group of protesters wrought havoc outside the Miami-Dade election office where the recount was taking place. Many of the disruptive protesters were Republican operatives and active GOP members bused in to create chaos and generate pressure. The scene of these middle-aged white men in suits and ties shouting at beleaguered local elections workers came to be known as the “Brooks Brothers Riot.”
The George W. Bush campaign contested this decision and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the landmark case Bush v. Gore, the court ordered a halt to the manual recount in Florida in a 5-4 decision, arguing that the recount process violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause requiring that people in the same circumstances be treated the same way by the law. The decision effectively handed the presidency to Bush.
Since then, Republicans have strategically pushed the idea that the Democratic Party seeks to make voting easier as a way to defraud elections. After 2000, as political scientist Lorraine Minnite has chronicled, Republicans began using the voting rights enforcement routines in the Justice Department as a campaign strategy. “That strategy was to aggressively investigate Democrats and their allies for voter fraud on the barest of evidence,” Minnite writes, “to use the media to promote the investigations while ginning up media coverage of alleged ‘fraud,’ and to strategically time and keep those investigations open to influence elections.”
This idea of Democratic voter fraud was powerfully amplified by Trump in the 2016 election, which propelled the “Stop the Steal” movement in the fall of 2020 and thus the events of Jan. 6, 2021. It also gave rise to the proliferation of an American version of the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory that immigration to European countries is being encouraged in order to replace the white population: the idea that Democrats are bringing in unauthorized immigrants to vote illegally.
Throughout the 2024 election, Trump has been repeating the same thing he said in 2020, that he can only lose if the election is rigged — a message echoed by major figures associated with the campaign, Elon Musk in particular. But we should be clear that this is not simply a conceit of wild-eyed Trumpism. The Heritage Foundation has spent the last year preparing the ground to challenge Democratic victory at the polls through an organization called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), by steadily undermining the very idea that any election could be fair. Last July, in an event marking the release of a report on the 2024 election, Heritage announced that, “As things stand right now, there is a zero percent chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America.” The entire Republican Party, from trunk to tail, is repeating election security lies, supported on one side by extreme-right voices like the white supremacist Laura Loomer and the War Room’s Owen Shroyer, and on the other by the chief think tanks of the conservative establishment.
The possibility of mass MAGA demonstrations and waves of legal challenges by Trump campaign lawyers and Republican legislators opens the door to uncertain outcomes, particularly in an election that appears to be very close, and we know that the Supreme Court is not above intervening, should the opportunity to decide the election present itself. Already, the court has ruled that Virginia’s purge from voter registration rolls of 1,600 people suspected of not having citizenship could go forward, despite the fact that officials haven’t proved those suspicions to be true.
At the same time, much has been done to shore up and clarify elections and their certification through the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which closes a number of avenues to legal challenges and makes a repeat of 2020 less likely. Moreover, the heightened anxiety about another election coup attempt being experienced by many Democratic voters means that any election subversion by the Trump campaign will be met with enormous media exposure.
What is now becoming a quadrennial event raises serious questions about the resilience of the U.S. electoral system. Indeed, there is not one electoral system, but rather thousands in a country where ballots are designed, cast, counted and reported by local elections boards in states with widely varying laws concerning registration, methods and eligibility.
But beyond questions about logistical problems, we are faced with a far more difficult one: Are the institutions of liberal democracy themselves resilient enough to stave off a severe fascist threat?
Given the severe dysfunction of Congress in the last two decades, the openly flaunted partisanship and gift-taking by the Supreme Court and the radical reorganization of the executive branch proposed by Project 2025, we should not be sanguine about the answer. Add to that the gerrymandered fashioning of permanent Republican rule in a majority of state legislatures, and a Republican Party that has itself been thoroughly transformed into an authoritarian instrument — from the Republican National Committee down to nearly every local party organization — and it is very difficult to say our institutions themselves can withstand fascism.
If we pull the lens back further, we can see the broader forces that both challenge liberal democratic rule and foster the conditions for fascism — the extreme concentration of wealth, ongoing and rapidly increasing climate catastrophe and mass refugee flows among them. These, along with the forces of domination and exclusion that have always shaped American life — including white supremacy, empire-building, heteropatriarchy and the despotism of the marketplace — make it clear that we cannot simply defend existing institutions. It’s not just fairly adjudicated elections that we need, but the very possibility of a democratic, not to say survivable, future.
Fervently believing that your president has always already won the election ultimately betrays a deep fear that you cannot survive the exigencies of a world in which he hasn’t. If we cannot address this deeper crisis, we will continue to see more Americans finding a home in the aggressively masculinist authoritarianism of MAGA, seeking invulnerability for themselves by preying on the vulnerability of others.
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